


The girl who saved the world (and changed it too)

by I_Dunno_What_To_Pick



Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla (Web Series) RPF, Carmilla - All Media Types, Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Genre: F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 18:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8296487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Dunno_What_To_Pick/pseuds/I_Dunno_What_To_Pick
Summary: Two days after saving the world, Laura Hollis considers her future, Carmilla's fails at being mortal, and the perils of a motorbike.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Human Carmilla is my favourite thing so I fluffed.

Two days have passed since you died and Carmilla was given life again.

It’s weird to think about it in binaries, like it’s some kind of story that might have happened to someone else.

You lie on your back in your childhood home, your dad asleep two doors down. Given everything that’s happened, coming home to the place that made you almost seems strange. Too simple. Too easy.

As if the end of the world hadn’t started and finished in one cruel swoop 48 hours ago.

Wally, your childhood teddy bear, sits on a shelf across the room. The temptation is there: to sweep him up and cuddle him. He smells like old memories and washing power and your dad too, a little, and you’re not too old to want to say goodbye to childhood.

Instead, you stare into the dark, a phantom pain where your heart was - until it wasn’t. You’re not even sure if you’re remembering it properly; if that’s really how it felt at all. Two days have nulled some of the sting of dying.

Like _dying_.

You like to think you’re a bit like the Doctor now and you’ve regenerated, but without the awkward cast change.

Your breathing evens out and strums in lungs that feel so present, but still you can’t sleep, staring instead at your door and thinking of Carmilla – always Carmilla – your very human girlfriend who’s probably awake on the couch in the living room.

A tiny knock comes on the door and you can’t help the smile. It’s instinctive now, when you think of her and all this love. You never thought it was possible to love someone else so much, but it’s this constant feeling that’s made a home between your ribs.

You’ve been waiting for Carmilla to make an appearance. She’s been quiet – quieter – and you let her have her time. She comes to you when she’s ready.

“Come in,” you whisper, tentative in case you wake your dad. _He_ hadn’t even insisted on spare rooms; Carmilla had, her 17 th century sensibilities lingering still.

Another knock, louder this time and it occurs to you that Carmilla may not have heard the whisper with human ears. You consider calling out again, but give her this instead: pushing back your duvet and rising, hands clasping around the door handle.

On the other side of the door, Carmilla seems so small.

Fragile.

 _Human_.

She leans against the frame, smiles with such gentleness that it catches in your chest every time. Warm hands circumnavigate around to your heart.  

You return the favour, mapping your fingers over her heart. The steady beat. The intake of breath; the way it makes you both shiver. It almost hurts, seeing this subtle fright every time she looks at you in the night time.

It’s the dark you think, and how afraid of it is she is – and how it gave her the power to bring you back. She’d told you the riddle. Ironic to Inanna, surely, how a creature of the night was so afraid of the dark.

“I’m still here,” you say. It’s almost a joke.

“I know.”

Her hands slide and she locks her fingers through yours. Silently you walk her back to your bed. Wally still stares.

You just want to sleep, too exhausted for anything more. She’s tired too, almost always, as she catches up. Though she’ll never admit that climbing two flights of stairs leaves her winded or how you’re faster than her now.

“Ow,” Carmilla hisses, and you squeeze her hand.

“Carm?”

“Stupid fucking toe.”

You don’t need light to imagine her frown. Mortality was always going to be a transition.

Besides, stubbing your toe is a particular pain second only to stepping on Lego.

“After all these years,” she continues, “humans have yet to evolve to see in the dark.”

Rolling your eyes, you tug Carmilla behind you and shuffle so you are pressed together in your too-small bed, the drumbeat of her newly-present heart playing a soothing rhythm against your chest. Idly, you reach out and knock the switch for the night light you had as a child.

It died a long time ago but you made sure to put batteries in it last night, because the pattern looks like stars and you think Carmilla will find that soothing.

She makes a little noise of contentment behind you and buries into the nape of your neck. It hits in an instant, so fast it almost makes you startle, that you want to look at her – just look at her – so you wiggle and flip around and kiss her very gently on the nose.

Her nose quirks and it’s the cutest thing.

Carmilla looks at you sometimes like you’re made of magic, of more than magic, and you’re not always sure you can deal with it. It's such a big responsibility: to hold someone else's heart in your hands.

You’re just a human girl who tried.

What is Carmilla too now if not a human girl who’s trying?

The thought makes your heart quiver a little, especially when you consider the life she’s led, first as a Countess, ignored and lonely, an anomaly in a time where being gay was a sin; viciously murdered and then traded to the Vordenbergs. Slaughter. Years of darkness following Inanna.

A brief and painful love, destroyed. Decades interned in a box in the ground, only to emerge shellshocked to war.

A chaotic escape to France only to be trapped and used again. You wonder sometimes how Carmilla emerged a person at all.

“I love you,” you say into the dark, and it can’t surmise the things you mean. No alphabet can.

Even in the dark, you see Carmilla’s shaky smile, the gentle exhale of her chest. Feel the rush of her pulse. She always had humanity, but your favourite part of her human form is how she’s so much more open. She can’t hide anymore, not with a body so keen on translating her secrets.

The way her pulse beats when you hold her hand. The sharp breath every single time you tell her you love her – and you make sure to say it as many times as she’ll let you, because she deserves to hear it. Love drove Inanna mad, but just as it served to almost break the world, it fixed it too.

You wonder sometimes who Carmilla will become. The trauma of her lifetime, her three centuries, won’t ever leave but she’s free now to live the life she chooses.  

You consider asking her, but it seems so trivial – “what do you want to be when you grow up?” – and even more trivial still when you remember she’s been 18 for 300 years. It strikes you all of a sudden that you don’t know when her birthday is, but that she’ll be 19 and you’ll throw a party and you don’t even care if no one but you and your dad and maybe LaF and Perry show up.

“What?” Carmilla says. “I can _hear_ your brain turning.”

“When is your birthday?”

Her brow crinkles, almost sarcastic, and you kiss her nose again, eliciting an elaborate eye roll. “Sometime in November.”

“Sometime?”

“Yes. I’ve forgotten the date.” She says it matter of factly but you’re sure you’d probably have forgotten your birthday too if you’d had over 300 of them.

“Oh. Okay.”

“I’ve been thinking, cupcake,” she says, and her voice shakes. You could swear she’s almost blushing.

 _Blushing_.

How novel.

“Uh-huh,” you prod. “Thinking. I hear that’s dangerous.”

“Instead of my birthday maybe we can mark the date I was made mortal?” She says the words so fast they almost trip into nonsense and you have to take a second to unscramble them.

“October 13th.”

“It’s stupid,” she says, “forget about it.”

You grin a little at the way her heart races, how before it would have come across indifferent but you know her so well now, human tells or not. “October 13th,” you echo. “Next October, you’re going to have your first birthday party.”

“Sure thing, cupcake.”

You laugh, kiss her quickly. “Technically,” you prod, “it was _your_ idea.”

She lets loose a noise and plops down onto your chest, wrapping tight around your waist. You’re happy to play the big spoon. She mumbles something else but you can’t understand it.

“Use your _words_ , Carm.”

She nips at the spot above your collarbone and you let your eyes flutter closed if only for a minute.

Your world will always be better with her in it, you decide. You don’t think she believes that – that she believes much in herself at all – but you have a life time to convince her that she’s worth so much.

“Carm?”

“I was thinking of getting a motorbike.”

“A _motorbike_?” And wow, all of a sudden you feel so much like your dad. Yesterday, Carmilla convinced herself she was going to die because she had a headache and her lungs were tight from the rubble in the air on your escape from Silas.

She’s lost the speed and grace vampirism afforded her, and sometimes you think she forgets she’s mortal. Last night, she spent a solid minute trying to light the fireplace with her mind before remembering she couldn’t.

You do _not_ like the idea of her on a motorbike.

Well, except for the part where it would be super-hot.

You really do miss her leather pants.

“Don’t you…uh…think that might be a little dangerous?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“But 10% of road deaths are motorcyclists—”

“Okay, _Sherman_ , calm down—” You cut her off with a dig to the side and she raises onto her elbows to look up at you with something akin to adoration. It’s a salve you think, this freedom. This burgeoning joy in the face of the apocalypse. “I am aware that my body isn’t quite so…indestructible so I promise to always wear a helmet.” Her touch is gentle as she buries back onto your chest. Mumbles some more.

You know you can’t stop her from getting a motorbike. Wouldn't even dream of trying. She’s spent the last 300 years being manipulated and controlled. You absolutely will never do anything even akin to telling her what to do.

Her life is hers now.

“Just know that my dad is going to be _so_ bad. You’re, like, part of the family now too. He’s already started making you a special little ‘new human’ first aid kit.”  

You feel her heartbeat pick up and her grin from where she’s pressed her face right against your chest. You’ve known for a long time that she’s been so lonely but Alt-Carmilla and Mattie’s taunting confirmed it. You’re certain she’s wanted desperately for a family. She’s far too soft and romantic not to.

She doesn’t say anything else so you give her an out. “Who knew saving the world would be so tiring, huh?”

“I could use a nap,” she says, surer now. Some things never change.

And you may only be 19 and silly and naive and all those other things she’d said that were once so true, but you’re also the girl who changed the world and saved it too.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ah-lads-i-need-to-stop


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